Peace, Harmony and Love

Dear All,

A super quick post about a project that I finally managed to make after all kinds of hurdles posing themselves in my way! :( A peace symbol, a white dove :)

The wings are made of endless fringing (and my inspiration for fringing remains Meg Crawford, who fringes SO beautifully and patiently!).........

The body of the dove is made of clay and covered with tear drop punches, made using Martha Stewart teardrop punch. Rest is pretty self-explanatory :) If I didn't hate fringing so much, maybe, I'd make some more birds! Haha!

Happy Quilling

Pritesh

PS: If my posts inspire you to create something on similar lines, I feel highly flattered. But please, do respect the effort I take in conceptualizing and executing, please give a direct link to my work when you are inspired by mine. Thanks for understanding........:-)

Quilled National Bird.........

Dear All,

Quilling a peacock had been a long-standing dream of mine :) So, when Shital asked me if I would do a peacock, I jumped but almost immediately followed panic attacks. For anyone who has seen a peacock up close, figuring the plume colours out is like trying to count the number of cells in out body! It's a spectacularly beautiful bird, and correspondingly difficult to quill!!!!!

Here we go with the finished project :)

Stage 1 was simplified greatly by Shital by providing the base on which  the peacock was to be made. And Stage 2 stumped me for quite some time. The correct blue was impossible to find in shimmer texture. I scoured the old city markets but the correct blue seems to have disappeared from the face of this Earth! Bless Fevicryl, they keep coming up with products that have often been life savers for my craft needs!!!!!

The latest (HEAVILY recommended) range of sparkle paints came to my rescue. The hues in these paints are brilliant and affordability? Ah, Fevicryl style, they are extremely reasonably price :) So, I took the waste paper left over from paper cutting for text strips and painted sheets after sheets in the blues and greens. I wish I had taken photos of that too! Thanks to high humidity, the papers took forever to dry and forever looked soggy from all the paint......

To make the body of the peacock look 3D, I resorted to Panduro air-dry clay. I'm no clay expert, so please excuse the undulated surface! :D I randomly cut out another waste paper (left over from sample printing) into  peacock body shape and adjusted clay to the shape.

Making the peacock body feathers was the most strenuous part of this project. I used my Martha Stewart teardrop punch for punching out really small tear drops of the sparkling blue paper. Then started the arduous task of fringing these teardrops with a width of ~ 0.3 mm. My eyes are probably hurting because of this strain ;) But after about 300 of these, the upper body of the peacock began to take shape :)

Peacock doesn't really make your life easy! :D It's "flying wings" are random shades of black, white and brick red. My empirical methods came to the rescue! :D I drew random lines on white paper and thus resulted the flying wings of the peacock :)

The plume "base" was again air-drying clay, flattened to provide a shallow base for the feathers to rest on top.

It was the GREEN of the feathers that took maximum creativity! Phew! I have used Sparkle Pearl Green by Fevicryl as the base. On top went hints of Sparkle Pearl Blue and Sparkle Pearl Violet. The slightest tinges of brownish are Daler Rowney Bronze acrylic paint, which was used by dabbing a cotton ball in the paint and then tinging VERY lightly over the feather. This "process" took almost 15 iterations to get right! My room looks like a peacock has been beaten to death there, with so many "feathers" lying around! ;)

The "eyes" of the feathers are made out of 1 mm strips hand-cut out of 120 gsm beige shimmer paper. The tight coils were shaped and then, coloured from top. The colours remain the same, except green, which is Pearl Green by Fevicryl.

The rest, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. :) I HAVE TO thank my feedback system here :) 

The first in this list is Pri, who communicated right at 6 am or so (IST) and planted the 1 mm strips idea in my head :) You're a DARLING lady! You have no idea that I owe you my career :)

Second is a very what-you-see-is-what-you-get lady, who has never let me down. She always provides honest feedback, whether I like it or not ;) So, a MILLION thanks Ketaki

My life line, my baby, Baba always has been a pillar of strength, the one who managed to talk me into quilling, in the first place! :D As always, her feedback was forever available, so that Didi never wavered from her task at hand :)

One lady who has never failed at giving me feedback, that too in detail, is Manu. She diligently writes back, not just with feedback but also, suggestions about what and how I can use to make my projects better. 

And yeah, thanks to other people who put up with my incessant Whatsapp messages! Thanks Tarun, Sanasi, Meg, Yamini! You guys mean a LOT! Keep twisting my ears whenever you feel I'm losing focus :) 

Happy Quilling

Pritesh

PS: If my posts inspire you to create something on similar lines, I feel highly flattered. But please, do respect the effort I take in conceptualizing and executing, please give a direct link to my work when you are inspired by mine. Thanks for understanding........:-)

Fringing flower video tutorial

Hello All,

Thanks to Internet snarls and power-cuts, after almost 1.5 days of making the video, here is the video for how to make the double fringed flower, for which I posted the technical terms (as I thought they should be termed :D) in a post. The video is not particularly great resolution, but if I made it any higher resolution, I'd spend a lifetime uploading it :(

This is how the flowers look:

And here's the video of how to make them :)

The photo tutorial (hear hear Sonia) is already there on Inna's blog. So, happy fringing and flower-making :)

Happy Quilling

Pritesh

PS: If my posts inspire you to create something on similar lines, I feel highly flattered. But please, do respect the effort I take in conceptualizing and executing, please give a direct link to my work when you are inspired by mine. Thanks for understanding........:-)

Fringing terminology tutorial

Dear All,

Once a scientist, always a scientist! :D So, when I got stuck trying to explain to a student how the various "parameters" of a double diagonal fringed flower correlate with the way the flower turns out to be, I had to sit down and assign terms to various parameters.

I don't know if someone else has done it already but I would go ahead and post a detailed one anyway. Please please refer to the original tutorial by Inna Dorman for these flowers.

Please feel free to ask for clarifications, if anything is not clear from the images and text. As you'll see in the tutorial made by Inna, this flower needs a paper strip to be folded horizontally and then, fringed. The image below is a very loose representation of the folded paper and puts a name to the various factors that affect how the flower turns out to be:

Now, coming to the explanation of various terms and how they influence the flower:

1. Fold width: Fold width is the width one gets after folding a long paper strip horizontally. The "diameter" of the final flower is determined most directly by the fold width. The resulting flower will at least be double the number of the fold width (e.g. if the fold width is 1 cm, the resultant flower will be at least 2 cm in diameter). Also, the more the folding width, the more the length of the strip will be needed for making a "fuller" looking flower. E.g. if the fold width is 1 cm, a 30 cm strip is enough to make a full looking flower. If the fold width is doubled to 2 cm, the length of the folded paper needed nearly doubles as well.

2. Fringing angle: Fringing angle is the angle at which you fringe. The smaller the fringing angle, the wider the flower will get. A nearly ideal angle to follow would be 45 degrees, but it is not mandatory. In my experience, this leads to best looking flowers. The smaller the angle the longer the paper you'll need as it takes more paper to give a fuller look to bigger flower. This is probably the most crucial of all factors in making a diagonal double fringed flower. While you fringe, maintain this angle constant for all fringes, or else, the flower will have uneven petals.

3. Fringing length: Fringing length is the total length of the cut made with scissors. For the same fold width, the smaller the fringing angle, the longer the fringe width will be. The longer the fringe width, the bigger the flower will be.

4. Fringing depth: Fringing depth is the horizontal distance between the folded edge and the end of the fringe cuts made. Fringing depth is directly correlated with the diameter of the eventual flower, in the sense that the deeper you cut (with everything else remaining the same), the bigger the flower becomes.

5. Fringing width: Fringing width is the width of each cut made while fringing. The smaller the fringe width, the easier it will be to get a Chrysanthemum like fullness to the flower. Making the fringe width too small, however, makes the flower lose its charm of two layers of paper opening up as you fringe. Around 1.5 mm gives a very full look to flowers.

Some pointers from experience:

• As you quill the double fringed layers, they tend to become cone like. The handling of the layers gets very tricky then. So, while making large double fringed flowers, take special care that the roll doesn't open up. 
• Too small a fringing angle (highly slanted cuts) increases the fringe length substantially and makes the flower big really fast. Try to keep the angle about as close to 45 degrees as you can manage to. It makes the flower look extremely good at the end.
• While starting rolling, try to keep the fringe cuts oriented such that the slant of the fringes is towards your left (for right handed people, that is). This will make sure the fringed cuts don't get entangled in your fingers as you roll). Thanks to Shweta Hardikar, she helped me figure this one out.
• After the flower is ready, you can press the central tight coil (if you used one) and also, gently press the petals to bring everything to level. 
• The flower assumes a dome like shape as you go on rolling. That makes it susceptible to opening up if not handled correctly.
• Glue at every 1 or 2 turns (Inna already tells you that through her tutorial). It helps make sure that the entire roll doesn't come off if the paper slips out of your hand.

I have tried to keep it as comprehensive and simple as I could manage to. Please feel free to correct me or ask me anything that is not clear. I may not reply immediately but reply I shall :)

Happy Quilling

Pritesh

Spring and summer :)

Hello All,

After hours and hours of donkey work, I finally managed to finish this project! :) And if you're wondering why I am hell bent on the term donkey work, consider this. Each fringed bunch in the bottlebrush flower (red bunch) has a paper strip 10.5 cm long and within that much, it has been fringed more than 250 times!!!!! I felt like I'll have grandchildren by the time I finish this project! Hehehe, but no worries, my son is still 1.5 yrs old! :D The font I've used is called Emporium Capitals :)

In this post, I have to give a HUGE thanks to Baloo Uncle, for the Fiskars fringing scissors which FINALLY made me overcome my fear of fringing! I used to dread it so much but fringing is a song now and I am revelling in the feeling :) The bottlebrush wouldn't have been possible without you.......I hope my client approves of what I have made for her :)

Another big thanks to my client, who is one of my dearest friends, for all the good times together, the whale, whalee and whaloo times! :D :D Those were the craziest moments of my life! :) A thanks to Meg Crawford whose fringing helped me try fringing or else, I'd have just kept away from it. Her suggestion of spring loaded scissors finally worked and I am not averse to fringing anymore :)

Am submitting this for "For the Love of Crafting" Spring challenge , using spring colours and 2 butterflies :) :)

Happy Quilling

Pritesh

PS: If my posts inspire you to create something on similar lines, I feel highly flattered. But please, do respect the effort I take in conceptualizing and executing, please give a direct link to my work when you are inspired by mine. Thanks for understanding........:-)